The Best American Poetry

Mystification, mystery & Mystery: Who is Sequana, who whacked her and why I am forever ruined [by Paul Tracy Danison]

A brother of mine once had a striking dream in which we were both dancing a Waltz in a Viennese ballroom.

As my partner and I whirled past, my brother told me, he cried out in anguish, “Trace, What is Mystery?” I only raised my eyebrows, in surprise, perhaps. In incomprehension, probably, and whirled on and away.

We used to laugh about it, my sweet bear or a brother and I, but I know the dream troubled him till his death.

Well, then, as the world is bien fait...

Just the other day, beyond the city walls, at the source of the river Seine, Mystery reared up and told me what.

Mystery is unnamable, but not at all mute, rather the silent words of a beating heart or the ineffable motive of an explicable act. One never knows when Mystery will reveal itself. But when it does, your heart is broken and you are ruined, forever. All the same Mystery's not so bad. And far far better than most other things.

The illumination came about because Karine & I went over the wall the other day for a reckless little motoring venture outside the city – love that word, “motoring”.

That is, we translated to the other side of the Paris ring road – la Périphérique.

Translated. Mystery’s truth is found only outside your particular city walls.

Apparently, even Socrates knew this: our inner metropolises are grids where routine eventually substitutes for dream – even for our Parises, even our Jerusalems, even our Athenses, our Idahos. This is why, Paris within the walls, intramuros, is not the same creature as Paris without the walls, extramuros.

We toured the world-historical Côte d’or department in a Ford rental. Although reality can be pesky, it is only a low-grade illness, so I am able to durably remember it as Karine and I in a two-seater Stutz Bearcat, goggles raised, long silk scarves flapping in the wind. I invite you to do the same.

In our case, revelation begins as a reasonable lack of credulity. Were this true for all!

The official explanatory sign at the archeological dig at the spring from which the river Seine rises on the Langres plateau in Burgundy – says the place was long a pilgrimage site. “Sequana”, it says, is the name of the good goddess of the place. A statue of her was found, it says, but at the dawn of the Christian era it had been deliberately defaced by blows from a hammer.

Once the preliminary facts have been disposed of, the sign explains that it is all very much a mystery why this place was a “pagan” pilgrimage site before Christianity became the only legal religion. Also mysterious: who in the world deliberately defaced the “pagan” goddess Sequana’s statue in the dawn of the Christian era?

What? None of this is Mystery that any sane person can not unveil if the will for it exists. A deeply green, deeply shaded, brightly lighted, lovely, spring that seems hidden and private and is yet in plain sight is still great for a picnic, for camping, for frolicking, even after “pagans” have long gone the way of the buffalo and any fat fool can drive up in his beat-up Chevy. Also, earlier humans, not yet in possession of monotheistic religion, capitalism and powerful earth-moving equipment, tended to have a snivelly fear of puissante Nature rather than of a vengeful god and/or of their human betters, so they made much of Mother Earth rather than just moving the bulldozers in.

Also, if it wasn’t the same early Christians who also knocked the penises off every statue in Europe who deliberately hammered up poor Sequana once they got the bit of exclusive legality between their teeth, I’ll eat Osama bin Laden’s burnoose. 

I ask you.

Then there are Mysteries – properly speaking, “mystifications” – that are boldly presented as rational, even lucid, explanations, but simply defy all rational understanding.

The modern name "Seine", for instance, is said to derive from the Celtic word “Sequana”. But once each pansemic phoneme has been sussed, it’s still a mystery just how a tongue, even that of a stone-age brute with a thousand years to lash at it, might squeeze “seine” out of “sequana” or even, as one bright soul hastens to clarify, out of “se ku a na”, is well beyond me.

It remains a mystery, too, how it is that, by the “regular rules” of geography, the river Seine at Paris is really the river Yonne, or how it is that such rules were arrived at in such a way that the celebrated rivers Seine and Yonne would be exceptions to them.

“Karine, do you understand any of this?”

“No. I’m completely mystified. You?”

She gives me a sharp look. I feel her daring me to make some ridiculous claim. Understanding the polysemic phonemal variational evolution in Galloromantic country dialectic, perhaps.

I dismiss this quarrelsome woman with an unseen wave of the hand.

“I asked first. And, no. Yes. No. Well.”

It comes to me. “Listen, Karine,” I say, cupping my ear in my hand.

“In the days when we first met,” I begin, “You were just making a friend of your great professor. Remember?”

Dead now, he was a very nice fellow, indeed.

I met the Professeur Arouet rather formally, I reminded her, when she invited him for lunch with us at a restaurant.

Karine's idea was that, around the table together, we would, could, then, all agree to use first names. That accomplished, she would use the social momentum thus engendered to invite “François” Arouet home to dinner!

“I was so excited.”

And no wonder, I thought. Inviting one’s particular esteemed Monsieur Arouet is something quite special when you’re a student.

“You really, really loved and admired your Arouet. So much.”

“I did.”

To this very day, sitting next to me in this Stutz Bearcat, watching the road with an easy attention as she steers us through the Burgundy countryside, she is grateful Aouet existed. She brims, is brightened, with gratitude, this sweetest and most profound of all feelings, which, as far as I know, is exclusive to moments of real loving or real learning.

It was in waiting for this important Lunch with Arouet that I was shuffling around on the corner of the rue de l’Ecole de medicine, in front of the Gibert book shop, staring at the clumps of humans fluxing up and down the boulevard Saint Michel.

There are many, many human species, billions of them, I have come to see. This is why there are so many suits at Brooks Brothers.

There.

As if determined to broil as well as run mad in the noon-day sun, one short, stocky specimen is wearing a winterized, shiny, bluish-orange watered-paisley affair of a jacket, the cheap, poncho-like, fabric draping stiffly above a scratchy-looking set of high-waisted, dismatching pants.

I said to myself, “So he’s the guy who bought that!”

With not much to say for his shoes and haircut either, I just guffawed and scuffed the ground, like a certain lower-class of American will do around his cracker barrel.

The outfit might very well spontaneously combust from rubbing the pants legs together or from trapped body heat. Hardeeharharyep.

Then, I had a Walter-Mitty moment. I woke to find the specimen smiling and waving at me as he dodged through the snorting, increasingly aggressive herd of automobiles crowding onto the crosswalk of the wide, wide Boul’ Mich’.

I had just had time to think, “O, no, he thinks I’m …” when Karine burst by me, crying, “O! Monsieur Arouet! Nous voilà! Nous voilà!”

I realized then that that absurd suit, bought and paid (very, very damned little) for by the specimen demonstrating it in the public thoroughfare, was none other than my (then new) Dulcinea’s preferred professor.

Snatching bonne figure from the pickle barrel, I was able to twitch my cracker scoffing into a rictus of what was presumably understood as pleased recognition.

We did, of course, agree to dine.

“It was my job to get François and bring him to your sister’s house,” I reminded her. Karine’s sister’s house is three Métro stations plus a pretty long bus ride outside Paris.

“It was so sweet of you to offer,” Karine smiles pleasantly.

Actually, I had wondered that I was appointed to accompany our new-friend. I was too ignorant in those days to dare ask anybody. Was I expected to throw my coat over puddles? Was there some secret to getting over the Périphérique. A tax to pay? Do only certain of us specimens know the way to the suburbs? Know how to take the metro? Know how to catch a bus? I had no idea.

Specimen Arouet – to honor Karine’s invite, again wearing that absurd suit, bless him – and I were sat down side by side in the Métro, bathed in the clack of the wheels.

Arouet said, “This is so good of you.”

He softly patted my hand, this man no older than I am today. He gently gripped my wrist.

I knew in a flash that he was going to break my heart and ruin me for serious work. Forever.

“Karine is so good to me,” he continued. “Voyez-vous. Such a bright student, so rare! And then she is such a pleasure to work with.”

He paused a full half minute, looked in my face, considered. “I am so happy that you are making it possible for me to accept her invitation.”

François Arouet then explained that he had not left Paris intramuros, indeed, had hardly left the fifth arrondissement, in much better than 30 years. Ever since he had been demobilized in Spring 1963, following his service as a conscript in the French army in Algeria.

“Until your petite amie invited me, to me, leaving Paris had not seemed worth the risk,” he said.

I saw his eyes tear and felt his hand squeeze mine, so I turned away and looked out the window, which was the only thing I could think to say in front of this Mystery.

“Are you as hungry as I am?” Karine said, striding towards the Stutz, breaking my silence. “I’ve had enough of Mystery for one day. Let’s go find some place to eat.”

Friday the 13th [by David Lehman]

It’s Friday the 13th and I wonder

how the superstition got started.

I’d always thought it was because

there were thirteen diners at the

Last Supper but I recently saw a

documentary about the Knights

Templar according to which

King Philip of France mounted

a ruthlessly efficient surprise

attack on the Templars

and tortured them until they

confessed they were heretics,

gnostics. That happened on

a Friday the 13th in the 14th

century, and ever since it’s been

an unlucky day to be caught

in a storm or shoplifting or in bed

with a person other than your mate

or just crossing the street before

looking both ways in New York,

where, from one point of view,

it’s always Friday the 13th

-- 2 / 13 / 98 [from The Daily Mirror, 2000]

Snake Handling and Confessional Poetry [by Nin Andrews]

In my last post, I compared confessional writing to snake handling and taxidermy, pointing out that taxidermy is like writing about the dead, while snake handling is like writing about the living. I left the topic of snake handling untouched, largely because I am not enthusiastic about writing about my living relatives and friends. But I recently received an email asking me to elaborate on the topic of snake handling. Really, Nin? Have you ever handled snakes? I was asked.  (The short answer is not much, but the brilliant southern poet, John Lane, is a snake enthusiast, should you want to search out the writings of a snake handler. But I digress.) 

I thought I’d start by describing the day I first tried to hold a snake. My sister, D., had just returned from Nature Camp. It was a hot summer day, and I was so happy to see her when she announced, Snakes are really neato, Nin. (Neato was the word back then.) And they're a cinch to catch. Wanna try?  I didn’t answer her.  She went on to tell me about the herpetologist who was her camp counselor—how he had told her that we are never more than a few feet from a snake in Virginia. To prove his point, she reached out and grabbed a small Eastern Garter snake that was gliding into the Johnson grass by the car, and held it out to me. Grab him beneath the neck, she said. I didn’t point out that snakes don’t have necks. Instead I quickly dropped the snake and jumped back. 

Are you scared of a little garter snake? she asked.

Not exactly, I wanted to say. But I don’t want to hold onto one. I just get this feeling . . .  

And that’s the feeling I have when I pick up my pen and try to write about the secrets or revealing moments of someone I know, especially someone I love or once loved.

The experience makes me think of those early writing classes when everyone was trying to follow the dictum, Write what you know. Our writing material, we were informed, is all around us. You don’t need or want to imitate Poe or Whitman to be a poet. Many of us were reading Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath and using them as role models.  The more distressing the material, the more applauded our poetry seemed to be. I felt as if I were trying to grab the creepy or unsavory moments from my days and hold them up for everyone to see. I remember wondering if Wordsworth had been a confessional poet, would he have defined poetry as creepiness recollected in tranquility? Or the spontaneous overflow of toxic feelings? 

I will always remember one of my early poetry workshops in which a woman’s poems described her boyfriend’s sexual inadequacies. The poems were graphic, and they were hard to erase from my mind. I can’t tell you whether the poems were any good or not, but I can say that the boyfriend was in my philosophy class. I was never able to look at him without wondering if the poems were accurate. 

But I don’t mean to suggest that all of our poems in those days were so deeply personal or potentially humiliating. No, many were as innocuous and commonplace as garden-variety black snakes, milk snakes, or the red bellied snakes. The appeal of the poems, I realized after a while, relied not on what they confessed, but rather on how much they could startle and entertain a reader. After a while, I became accustomed to the style of poetry, even if I never mastered it. 

In this same way, I became accustomed as a girl to the many harmless snakes that cohabitated with us in our childhood home. I don’t know at what point it became commonplace to open a closet or look under the sink and discover a snake curled up in the corner behind a shoe or a bottle of dish soap. Those of you who have lived in the rural South might know how much snakes like to come inside in the fall, along with the field mice.  As a girl, I would sometimes wake in the night and hear a distinct swishing sound of a blacksnake gliding across the attic floor overhead. When I complained to my parent, my mother insisted that the snakes were our friends. We should be happy they were living in our attic. They dined on the rodents that had also moved into the attic and, unlike the Orkin man, they left no chemical residue behind. 

When I went into the attic in spring to find my summery clothes, I would often discover a few snake skins, some that were several feet long. 

I suppose I am stating the obvious here to say that the older I grew, the more aware I became of just how peculiar my family was. How many odd little tales I could tell, as I am telling now.  

There is something so complicated about writing about your close friends and family, even if it is so done these days, and often done so well. I doubt I’m unique in my hesitations. I recently finished a collection of novels, the Neopolitan Novels, written by an Italian author whose pen name is Elena Ferrante. What fascinated me about the books was the vivid and exhaustive descriptions of a lifelong rivalry and love/hate relationship between two women, one of whom is a writer.  The promise that is broken and that ultimately breaks up their friendship is the promise of the writer—not to write about her friend. I couldn’t help but think that Ferrante’s hidden identity allowed her a greater level of honesty than she might have had if she had written the book as nonfiction. 

But in fiction and nonfiction, I lack of courage, though once or twice, I have written briefly about my father who was, among other things, a gay man who was kicked out of the Navy for having an affair with an officer, and who underwent counseling to be “cured.” I don’t know what his counseling entailed, and I have often wondered. My mother married him, knowing he was gay, and never expected him to be otherwise. I know of several books about the suffering caused by the gay/straight marriage, but the books don’t describe my parents. My mother, a pragmatist, was very open about her belief that homosexuality is genetic, and she quite eagerly looked at each of her six children to see which of us had  inherited the gay gene. Once, after asking one of my sisters if she was a lesbian, my mother speculated that the gene might skip generations, sort of like red hair. My father, however, was not forthcoming about his sexuality, though he kept photos and letters from an ex-lover in his sock drawer and always had gay friends. To write about his sexuality used to feel like a violation, but nowadays, the topic is so much tamer than it once was, I no longer feel as if I am trespassing when I write about him.

Maybe part of the problem I have with confessional poetry is that it so often involves confessing another’s secrets, not my own. I have one poet-friend who wrote a lot of very revealing poems about her family and then informed her siblings and parents that her poems had nothing to do with them. Any unflattering resemblance to reality was not intentional. But she was lying, and no one was fooled. As a result, she is still not particularly welcome or comfortable at family functions. She says her family keeps asking her why she cast them in such an unflattering light. How can I tell them—they’re just poems, she asked me, meaning, What did they expect? Hallmark cards? She added, Why can’t they just chill? 

Her use of the word, chill, reminds me of the day my sister decided to catch a few copperheads and photograph them. She wanted the snakes to remain still or  move slowly, so she put the copperheads in the deep freeze so they would cool down and slow for her photo shoot. Imagine me, reaching unsuspecting into the freezer for a Nutty Buddy and finding a few half-frozen snakes. 

Generally, I think, families, like those snakes, do chill out. They get used to their poet-sibling, parents, or children. They learn to tolerate a certain amount of exposure with grace. Maybe they realize that the slim volumes of poetry are rarely read. Perhaps it is that anonymity that makes us poets brave. Most of us know that the chances of our getting a decent audience are minimal. I think I, for one, could have written entire volumes about my family, and they would never know, much less read them.

All the same, I still think of reasons to hesitate. I had a student in a workshop once who asked me if she could get sued for a poem she wrote about her abusive yet ultra-wealthy ex-lover. I don’t know the answer, but I suppose it might be possible. I don’t think that’s happened, or has it? This woman said that she’d always felt like a mouse in a lion den, something vulnerable and small. She also admitted she wanted revenge. Even if it were just in a poem. And she added, There is something magical about the power of words.

To keep pushing the snake analogy, I was reminded by her of the winter my sister bought a boa constrictor at the pet store. Her boa had a short and tragic life. A few weeks later, the snake’s dinner, a small white mouse, ate it, crunching into its long body while the snake lay motionless in a glass aquarium on our living room table. When I pointed out the mouse-eating snake, my mother looked up from her newspaper and sighed. To think, I thought someone was eating Triscuits in here. Nature is just full of surprises, isn’t it? My mother, an Ancient Greek scholar, then alluded to the Spartan women who beat up any men who failed to perform their studly duties. Exactly what the Spartan ladies had to do with snake-eating mice, I wasn't certain, though the image has stuck with me. 

This same poet who talked of seeking revenge through poetry also claimed that writing about her suffering was healing, which surprised me—I who am so squeamish. I am reminded of the day I told my mother I didn’t want to handle a snake, that I was afraid of them. She said how stupid I was, adding, Snakes are among the most valuable citizens of the natural world. Why do you think snakes were a symbol of healing in Ancient Greece?

I asked if they were also a healing symbol of Sparta, but she didn’t answer. 

Some people just have a way with snakes, she continued. They know their secret language, just as bird lovers know bird songs. Her friend, Polly Buxton, she informed me, could pick up rattle snakes with her walking stick. All she had to do was plant her stick on the ground, and they'd wrap around it like ribbons around a Maypole. I didn’t point out that Polly also talked to ghosts and said she had met Abraham Lincoln more than once, adding God rest his soul. 

My mother then lectured me on how I should learn to love all of nature, snakes included. She told me again and again her favorite snake tale about our distant relative, Mr. Frick, who often visited an island in the Caribbean and brought snakes back home with him on the planes (decades before the movie). In order to sneak his Caribbean snake collection through customs, he dressed his three little daughters up like Little Bo Peeps, complete with bonnets and baskets. The snakes he hid in the bottom of their baskets. The snakes, Mom claimed, slept through the entire plane ride and were never discovered by U.S. customs agents. Those little Frick girls kept them so happy. Why they must have been snake enchantresses. 

She told this story many times as if she were telling one of the miracles of Jesus. Only she added, This really happened. And, Imagine being that much in love with snakes. I know she wished I were more like my sister, D., and those little Fricks.  She hoped one day I too might grow up and learn to hold onto a snake. As she put it, snake-handling is a life skill. Sort of like riding a bike, only much more useful. Once you learn it, you never forget it. I’m still thinking about that, and I am still thinking about how to write a confessional poem.

 

Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College. The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort  was published by CavanKerry Press in 2010. Her most recent book, Why God Is a Woman was published by BOA Editions.  You can follow Nin's blog here . Or her Twitter.

Propagation of the Species (by Jennifer Michael Hecht)

Dearest Bleaders, 

So, yeah. As I keep sort of explaining. There's this photographer Reuben Radding whom I only know online, through our dear mutual friend Yvany Peery. He posted one of his photos, an important hand outside the window of a big black car, and Yvany commented that it reminded her of one of my poems, of which she offered a big chunk, about how sometimes when Stalin retouched Trotsky out of photos, he forgot the hand on the shoulder of the person next to him, so there's this floating hand, leftover. The point is, Yvany bossed us to do more match ups and it is fun so far and careful work. Here's our third on purpose. 

 

 

From On The Propagation of the Species

We parse the problem, nouning out the principle
players: friends, families, prospects. I interview
the possibility of a child;
ask it questions. Intone the word: Interested?
Then: Want to learn the word for widget?
Want to read Beowulf? Want to get named?

Shall we grin and bear it?
I admit, existence is where woeful
was conjured. Nonetheless, to recommend it,
there is Jell-O; average rainfall; the anchovy
app at Luna’s; and the fact that in the middle, many
change their minds on the whole shebang — get
a good one off in both directions. But you and I
are going to have to choose.

It is our autobiography
we are eating; you snooze you
lose. Still, in the midst of going too slowly,
all hell has been known to break loose.

A gang of snails attacks a tree sloth, steals her wallet.
Down at the station, police chief
questions: How’d they get ya?

Sloth says, I dunno, it all happened so fast.

 

The photo was taken by Rueben Radding in Brooklyn, NY in 2015. The poem excerpt is from my second poetry book, Funny (Wisconsin, 2005). It was first published in In Posse, where you can see it in its entirety. It occurs to me that it was also in the Best American Poetry Anthology 2005, when it was special edited by Paul Muldoon. I wrote it when I was figuring out whether to have kids. I did. I'm nodding at how well it reminds me of that feeling of trying to figure out if the odds were in favor of such a drastic move.

I'm writing prose right now on the mystery of why people have children and I'm taking the stance that it is a real mystery. I get why they're okay with it once they do it, the kids are rewarding as hell. But how do we know that before it happens? Why would anyone take on such a responsibility, expense, potential for pain. I'm starting to think there is no answer to that question. Better to just ask how we feel when we have done it, and how it feels when we have not. Happy Mothersday-Late.

Anyway, I'm sharing these here, so far weekly, and I hope you are glad about it. 

Honeycomb out.

 

Meet the Press: Dante Di Stefano in Conversation with Luke Hankins of Orison Books

DD: In her poem, “Ennui,” Stella Vinitchi Radulescu refers to Rainer Maria Rilke as her “father up / in the sky.” If there is any poet who embodies the mission of Orison Books it would be Rilke, a man who strove to write from inside the most terrifying angels. There is that famous passage from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge that begins: “…Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences.” Could you begin by channeling Rilke and speaking about the poems you have published at Orison Books as experiences?

LH: “Sit down, angel,” Radulescu also writes, “I am desperately alive” (“heart heart heart”). Like Rilke, Radulescu’s intimation of the danger and sublimity of the divine does not prevent her from speaking with and to it on the most familiar of terms—asserting a spiritual equality (and equivalence?) with even the highest manifestation of being. And, as with Rilke, Radulescu’s poems ought to be considered “spiritual” not primarily because of their subject matter, but rather because of their ability to suggest and embody a mode of being that is outside the ordinary. Her work is deeply experiential in this way.

Contemplating a broken ancient sculpture of Apollo, Rilke concludes, “You must change your life.” The greatest spiritual art is that which offers us an aesthetic experience that leaves us irrevocably changed. Orison Books’ goal is to discover and champion this kind of literature. One of our latest books, Jordan Rice’s Constellarium, is a fine example of this. Rice’s poems sometimes delve into explicitly religious and spiritual subject matter—often from a critical standpoint, in fact—but that’s not what makes her poems “spiritual,” in my mind. The spiritual aspect of her poetry is that it, as Fatimah Asghar has so insightfully noted, makes us contemplate “the body inside”—the fundamental and mysterious grounds of being rather than the superficial and readily apparent ones.

DD: In an interview with Asheville Grit, you note: “The mission of Orison Books is to publish spiritually engaged poetry, fiction, and non-fiction books of exceptional literary merit, and to promote cultural conversation around the intersections of spirituality and literature.” Can you explain how Orison Books came into being and how the cultural conversation that you mention has unfolded in the year or so that the press has existed?

LH: I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian environment, and while I struggled deeply and persistently with that ideology from a young age, I only evolved away from it relatively late in life—in my mid-twenties. In the intervening years I’ve come to see fundamentalist ideologies of all kinds as pernicious and dangerous, whether they’re religious, political, or philosophical. I remain unwilling, however, to sacrifice religious and spiritual traditions altogether, simply because I can no longer advocate a fundamentalist interpretation of them. After all, for millennia the mystics of both the East and the West have interpreted their religious traditions in experiential rather than dogmatic ways.

As with all human artifacts, our religions are full of both ugliness and beauty. In recent decades, it seems to me that American literary and intellectual culture has overcorrected in response to the negative aspects of religion, and has risked ignoring the vital importance of the spiritual life. Simply because one can’t subscribe whole-cloth to a religion, ought one discard its moral insight, its metaphysics, its pathways to transcendent experience? Is humanism possible if deprived of transcendent values and experiences? Can we not read religions more like literature than like legal contracts, as profound cultural poems rather than divine writ? And might not religious traditions, like poems or paintings, contain elements of genuine inspiration from a mysterious source—the duende or the divine—mediated through human consciousness, with all its imperfections?

One important model for me in developing Orison Books’ mission was the wonderful American Public Media radio program “On Being,” hosted by Krista Tippett. The show’s wide-ranging interest in spiritual and religious traditions is exemplary of how one can lead a life of genuine spiritual curiosity and openness, gleaning beautiful truths and possibilities from a vast array of sources, without subscribing to an ideology. I dreamed of a literary press that could model a similar approach in contemporary literature. Orison Books is my attempt to build that, alongside wonderful collaborators, supporters, and of course authors.

The cultural conversation that I hope Orison Books helps contribute to and inspire is in one sense ineffable—a gradual accumulation of individual conversations around our books, and around book reviews, profiles of the press (such as this interview!), and various other phenomena that ultimately elude any efforts at cataloguing. But it also involves discrete public events such as author readings, gatherings hosted by Orison Books, and potentially an annual conference—which I hope one day to be able to organize, although this is still in the “dream” phase.

DD: I’d like to talk a little bit about all four books Orison has published so far, starting with I Scrape the Window of Nothingness: New & Selected Poems by Stella Vinitchi Radulescu. Can you tell us about this remarkable poet and her collection?

LH: Stella is one-of-a-kind, as is her poetry. (Eleanor Wilner, in her endorsement of I Scrape the Window of Nothingness, aptly remarked that it is “daunting to even try to put into a few words a poetry that is sui generis….”) Stella grew up in Romania and began writing poems there in her native Romanian. As the atmosphere of oppression and threat toward artists and writers increased under the Communist regime, she emigrated in the early 1980s to Europe and then the United States. She speaks and writes in three languages—Romanian, French, and English. She holds a Ph.D. in French Language & Literature and taught for many years at Loyola University and Northwestern University. She has published poetry collections in Romania, France, Belgium, and the United States.

I first met her at the AWP Conference in Chicago in 2008, where I was helping staff the Asheville Poetry Review table. She and I spoke French together, and she gave me a copy of her gorgeous French collection Un cri dans la neige [A cry in the snow] (Editions du Cygne). I took the book home and read it, and was so struck by her poetry that I asked her permission to translate the poems into English. I’ve been working on translations of her French work ever since, benefitting from her input on the translations, and we’re close to completing a book-length manuscript.

Now, I’d like to clarify a point of confusion that frequently comes up: Stella writes poetry in three languages, but she does not translate any of her own work between the languages. So she has a distinct body of work in each language. The book that we published at Orison Books, I Scrape the Window of Nothingness, is a new and selected edition of her original English-language poetry—nothing in the book has been translated into English, but everything was originally written in English. I’ve published translations of her French poetry in literary magazines as well as in a chapbook from Q Avenue Press, and thus the confusion.

DD: How has your work as a translator influenced your own writing?

LH: To step into another language for a time allows me to return to English with fresh ears and eyes, more finely attuned to the sounds and structures of English because of the counterpoint of French. I believe that this sharpens my perception of the nuances of language, both as a writer and as an editor. I strongly recommend that any young writer who (like me) has a single native language intensively study at least one additional language, and spend time somewhere it’s spoken if at all possible.

DD: In reading Stella Vinitchi Radulescu’s work, I was interested in how her poems open a dialogue with American poets such as Wallace Stevens and John Berryman. I was especially taken by Radulescu’s poem “The Human Condition,” which chronicles her reading of The Dream Songs. I also see Stevens’ wintry footprints crisscrossing her work. Could you map out the affinities between Radulescu and these two American masters?

LH: I won’t do anything so thorough as mapping! But I’ll say that, in my reading, Stella’s poems demonstrate the influence of Berryman’s psychology and Stevens’ philosophy. Her work marries the linguistic distinctiveness and imagistic speed of Berryman with the profundity and playfulness of Stevens’ philosophical insight.

Other influences and allusions readers will note in her work include the Surrealists (both painters and writers), Ionesco, Akhmatova, Rilke (as you’ve already noted), Dickinson, Melville, Shakespeare, and Sappho.

DD: J. Scott Brownlee’s Requiem for Used Ignition Cap was selected by C. Dale Young as the winner of the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. I was very impressed by this book. Brownlee builds a doxology from shotgun shells, wildflowers, and catfish. The dominant mode of the collection is elegiac and the poet combines the devotional impulse with a lovingly drawn portrait of his hometown of Llano, Texas. This collection also provides a nuanced portrait of lower middle class white people, the same population Claudia Rankine discussed in her keynote address at AWP 2016. I could talk about this amazing collection for hours. Could you give us some insight into the strengths of this collection?

LH: There’s something saintly in Brownlee’s compassionate eye. Whether he’s observing the people of his hometown or the plants and animals that populate that geography, his gaze is never divorced from his empathic impulse. His poems are narrative without ever becoming longwinded or losing the shapeliness and concision of their syntactic and rhetorical movements across the page. They are finely-tuned and lush with detail. They modulate easily from biblical cadence to rural idiom. They both praise “thirteen moonslick catfish” and lament the hometown veterans who commit suicide and the rural poor who cook “chemical psalms” of meth. Always the poems reflect, as Brownlee writes in “Ars Poetica with a Dead Dog in It,” his “affection for this fallen world.”

We at Orison Books are thrilled to have recently learned Requiem for Used Ignition Cap won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award for a first book of poetry. It’s hard to imagine a more deserving book.

DD: Can you give some sense of the broad array of manuscripts that have been submitted to Orison so far? I’d like to know about the variety of ways contemporary poets (especially emerging poets) are writing the sacred.

LH: We’ve received many hundreds of manuscripts since we opened for submissions, primarily poetry and fiction manuscripts, but also non-fiction manuscripts and anthology proposals. I’m most familiar with the poetry submissions, as that is where I focus most of my editorial energy, and ask the genre editors (Karen Tucker, fiction; Nathan Poole, non-fiction) to head up the reading of work in their genres. I consult with them on any manuscripts that they are strongly interested in. I retain the final say over what we decide to publish or, in the case of the contests, name as finalists—but as I said, I rely on and trust our excellent editorial staff.

There have been no common denominators in the manuscripts we’ve seen. The range of work is remarkable, in terms of stylistic approaches, subject matter, and interpretations of our press’ spiritual focus. There simply is no common denominator. Some of the manuscripts reinterpret particular religious traditions; some of them draw imagery and ideas from an array of traditions; some create a surreal or allegorical world and never mention anything religious at all; some simply work to capture the strangeness of our existence and consciousness. It’s encouraging to see writers taking us seriously when we say that we’re interested in spiritually engaged literature “from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.”

DD: Constellarium by Jordan Rice is another impressive collection of poetry. The book is heartbreaking and beautiful. Reading Constellarium, I was reminded of Marie Howe and Jason Shinder; like Shinder and Howe, Rice brandishes the radiance of ordinary words in a way that is angelic. For all the suffering and pain that is explored in this book, the last line of the collection sums up the mitigating hope that Rice’s words burnish, when she writes: “and she stirs in the light. There is no sorrow.”  Although the collection chronicles the author’s gender transition from biological male to female, the collection reads as a spiritual allegory for all of us who seek meaning and belonging in an imperfect world. At the same time, poems like “Laser Therapy” and “Lost Body” let us see the struggles of a transgender person, up close and unvarnished.  What do you find most compelling about Jordan Rice’s poetry?

LH: Even when speaking of trauma, violence, and familial or romantic turmoil, Rice’s poems remain poised, elegant, composed. As a poet, she is well aware that understatement is often more effective than hyperbole, and her ability to write with such restraint is one aspect of her bravery.

I also admire the way the poems engage in ontological inquiry mostly implicitly rather than explicitly. Rice doesn’t brandish fancy philosophical terms or gender theory—although she would be perfectly capable of doing so if she wished—but rather speaks honestly and modestly about the experience of fluidity, about what Trace Peterson in her endorsement of the book calls “the in-between and liminal experiences of consciousness.”

DD: Orison Books recently published The Divine Magnet: Herman Melville’s Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Mark Niemeyer, with a forward by Paul Harding. This book is a treasure. How did Orison Books come to publish it?

LH: I was reading a wonderful book by the scholar Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer. He has a chapter on Melville, and he quoted from some of the letters to Hawthorne. They were absolutely stunning—lyrical, humorous, passionate—and I had never even heard anyone mention them before. I started investigating the letters, and got a volume of Melville’s complete correspondence through interlibrary loan. It was readily apparent that Melville’s letters to Hawthorne were intimate and urgent in a way none of his other correspondence was. And I thought that if I—an English major and creative writing MFA graduate—had never heard of these letters, then surely neither had a large portion of the general literary public! Research revealed that no one had yet released an edition of these letters in particular, and that the volumes of Melville’s correspondence that had been published—all decades old—had been scholarly volumes aimed at a narrow swath of Americanists in the academy. I was thrilled at the idea of bringing out a volume of the letters to Hawthorne that would highlight the relationship between these two luminaries of American letters—a volume that, while suitable for the classroom, would also have a broad appeal for the general literary public.

I began searching for a Melville scholar who was interested in editing the volume, and was eventually referred to Mark Niemeyer, a Melville scholar who teaches American Literature at the Université de Bourgogne in France and who has edited and co-edited numerous volumes of Melville’s work both in the U.S. and in France. He was likewise enthusiastic about the project, and headed up getting permission to reprint the material from Northwestern University Press, ensured the accuracy of our text, provided footnotes, suggested and oversaw the supplementary Melville material included in the book, and wrote a superb introduction.

The final element we wanted to include in the volume was a foreword by a contemporary writer responding to Melville’s letters from a literary perspective. Our fiction editor, Karen Tucker, alerted me to an interview in which Paul Harding—a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist—expressed his deep admiration for Melville. We contacted Harding through his agent, and he was excited by the project. He wrote an absolutely gorgeous foreword to the letters (which can be read online at the Tin House blog here.

DD: The Divine Magnet is a short book, but it includes Niemeyer’s excellent introduction, Harding’s beautiful foreword, Melville’s ten letters to Hawthorne, Melville’s famous review, “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” an excerpt from Melville’s long poem “Clarel,” and another short lyric poem, called “Monody,” which, arguably, commemorates Hawthorne’s death. The book brings together for the first time materials from the most intense period of this fascinating American literary friendship. What can writers today learn from this literary friendship?

LH: Human nature contains so many competing impulses. For the working writer or artist, prominent among these are the impulses to see our work as being in competition with that of others, or on the other hand being in conversation/collaboration. Melville beautifully models the healthier and more magnanimous impulse of championing and praising the work of one’s contemporaries. “Ineffable socialities are in me,” he writes to Hawthorne in one of his letters—and we would do well to imitate these “socialities” rather than the competition and jealousy that can so easily insinuate themselves into our minds and hearts. I’m not advocating an uncritical engagement with the work of our contemporaries. But I’m advocating an engagement that stems from magnanimity, generosity, and selflessness, rather than a sense of careerism or competition.

DD: In the letter from early May, 1851, Melville says, “It is a frightful poetical creed that the cultivation of the brain eats out the heart. But it’s my prose opinion that in most cases, in those men who have fine brains and work them well, the heart extends down to hams. And though you smoke them with the fire of tribulation, yet, like veritable hams, the head only gives the richer and the better flavor. I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart, than Jupiter Olympus with his head.” Reading this, I was reminded of the poet Milton Kessler, who said: “The mind must love the heart.” Can you speak about the sometimes opposing claims of head and heart in contemporary poetry?

LH: I love what Melville says in the letter you quote here. Although he’s clearly in a humorous mood—as he seems often to have been when writing Hawthorne—his underlying argument is very serious. He’s suggesting that the intellectual work that people voluntarily take up ought not be seen in dichotomous opposition to the “heart”—that is, their emotional and aesthetic lives. Rather, the reason people pursue their intellectual fixations is precisely because they care so passionately about them. And here is a teachable principle for novice writers, because often the novice writer assumes that the best way to convey emotion is to replicate or exaggerate it on the page. This often leads to the kind of hyperbole that can make seasoned readers cringe. Poetry in particular is too often presented as mere “self-expression” in American schools. As long as you’re expressing emotion, you’re being “poetic.” To see an ancient craft and art so often reduced in our education system to a mere discharge of emotion is, frankly, shameful.

DD: Last year, I reread Moby-Dick. The first time I read the novel I was sixteen, so most of it went over my head. Rereading it as an adult I was most surprised by Melville’s humor. I see that same humor in his letters. For instance, Melville threatens to call the constable on Hawthorne if he doesn’t come for a visit; Melville also says that employing “a capital initial in the pronoun referring to the Deity” betrays “a slight dash of flunkeyism.” In reading these words, I thought of that poem by Hafiz where he says that he and God are like two giant fat people in a tiny boat. Melville’s humor led me to wonder what you think about humor’s place in the poetry of religious experience.

LH: Often our greatest human blindnesses arise from taking ourselves and our limited perspectives too seriously. Master poets like Hafiz and Li-Po, for instance, continually remind us of this wisdom.

Melville relishes in defying the dictates of piety (as anyone who has read Moby-Dick knows), whether with humor or with deadly ferocity. I suspect he saw piety as a mere mask for the true depths of human feeling and thought, which God—if God exists—surely sees through anyway. “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb,” he says to Hawthorne in one letter, and in another, “Shall I send you a fin of the Whale by way of a specimen mouthful? The tail is not yet cooked—though the hell-fire in which the whole book is broiled might not unreasonably have cooked it all ere this.”

DD: You’ve written quite elegantly on this blog about the uses of irony in contemporary poetry. Do you have any additional thoughts to add to your post from a few years ago?

LH: I’ll add that, in literature, irony has its uses, but I see it primarily as a symptom. I’ll let that metaphor speak for itself.

DD: This summer you will publish the first edition of the annual Orison Anthology. I was honored to have one of my poems chosen for that anthology. Thank you again for selecting my work. Can you tell us about the anthology?

LH: I’m really happy to have your ravishing poem in the spirit of Theresa of Avila included in the anthology! The Orison Anthology is Orison Books’ annual collection of spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals during the preceding year, and we’ll be releasing the inaugural volume late this summer or early fall. It will be something akin to the now-defunct Best American Spiritual Writing, but with what I see as a broader purview and of course our own aesthetic leanings. I can tell you with confidence that it’s going to be a stunning assemblage of work. Contributors to the inaugural volume include Vandana Khanna, Carl Phillips, Alison Gopnik, Jane Hirshfield, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Molly Reid, Zeina Hashem Beck, Purvi Shah, Christian Wiman, Kimberly Johnson, Franz Wright, Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, Li-Young Lee, and many others. 

DD: Speaking of anthologies, you have an excellent anthology called Poems of Devotion (Wipf and Stock, 2012). Orison Books accepts anthology proposals year-round. Are there any anthologies currently in the works, besides the annual? Can you tell us some of the proposals you’ve seen so far?

LH: Orison Books author Jordan Rice (Constellarium) is in the planning phase of an anthology of spiritually engaged poems by LGBTQ writers, which I hope to publish in 2018 or 2019. I also have an idea for an anthology of contemporary writing responding to the work of the mid-20^th-century French mystic Simone Weil, although that will likely take some years to come to fruition.

DD: You are the author of a poetry collection, Weak Devotions (Wipf and Stock, 2011) and a collection of prose The Work of Creation (Wipf and Stock, 2016).  How has your work as an editor and book publisher influenced your life as a writer? In what ways has your writing life, in turn, influenced your editorial and publishing work?

LH: I feel that, as both an author and a publisher, I have a practical grasp of Christ’s “golden rule”—“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you!” I strive to treat Orison Books’ authors the way I would hope to be treated by an ideal publisher.

DD: What is the most encouraging experience you have had as an editor?

LH: Every time I get to say “Yes!” to something I truly love, and help usher it into the world.

DD: What is the most encouraging development you’ve witnessed in contemporary poetry?

LH: The immense variety. It’s encouraging to see the sheer number of people writing poetry these days, especially when their work diverges so widely, stylistically and formally. There may be little or no money in poetry, but the number of people engaged in this labor of love nonetheless is downright moving. The cultural tapestry that poets are weaving today is more representative of the actual population than it has ever been in history. Just consider how small a percentage of the population was even literate in previous centuries—due in large part to racial and class oppression—and much less had the leisure time to write or make art. The flood of cultural and literary production these days approaches the sublime. How ever will future generations sort through it all, along with what they’re making at the time?? But it’s marvelous to behold—something like the birth of millions of stars in one of our universe’s bursts of energy.

DD: If you could publish any dead poet at Orison Books, who would it be and why?

LH: What a question! The catch is that if said poet were not already published, what is the likelihood I would know of her? In which case, my response is Emily Dickinson. And I see no need to explain why.

DD: Next fall, Orison Books will publish Two Worlds Exist, the second poetry collection by Yehoshua November. This is the first collection of poetry you’ve published not directly informed by Christian spirituality, but it’s clear from your mission statement and from your prose that you want to publish the best spiritual writing from a broad variety of religious experiences.  Do you have in mind any contemporary non-Judeo-Christian writers that you’d like to publish?

LH: We are most definitely open to perspectives outside the Judeo-Christian tradition—even perspectives outside any particular religious or spiritual tradition. Again, I’d like to emphasize that for us “spiritual” writing has less to do with subject matter than with the experience it offers the reader.

Just a few contemporary writers I admire from outside the Judeo-Christian tradition—or who identify with multiple traditions—include Vandana Khanna, Purvi Shah, Sherman Alexie, Tarfia Faizullah, Joy Harjo, Zeina Hashem Beck, Amit Majmudar, and Tamam Kahn. I also think of poets like Jay Wright and Nathaniel Mackey whose work explores African spiritual traditions, poets like Jane Hirshfield and Gary Snyder who—though American—engage deeply with Eastern traditions, as well as poets like Annie Finch who are involved in the Wiccan/Pagan tradition.

Keep in mind that while we’ve received submissions from a wide array of perspectives, we’re not interested in publishing a manuscript simply because it exemplifies a spiritual tradition or perspective. Literary quality is always our foremost criterion. Over time, we will undoubtedly publish work from an increasingly broad range of perspectives. But this can’t happen all at once! We’ve brought out four books so far, over the course of about a year . . . . Give us a few years, and I think you’ll see how broad our mission truly is!

DD: Anyone familiar with Yehoshua November’s first collection, God’s Optimism (Main Street Rag, 2010), knows that November is a poet of great inner light. Can you tell us a little bit about what to expect from this new collection? Are there any radical departures from his first book?

LH: Should we expect any “radical departures” from a poet who actively practices an ancient religious tradition? Certainly not! And it’s a good thing for us. We need no departure from November’s delicate, nuanced meditations on the harmonies and dissonances that a Hasidic father, husband, and professor experiences in 21^st-century America. The inner light remains—burns bright.

Luke Hankins is the author of a collection of poems, Weak Devotions, and the editor of Poems of Devotion: An Anthology of Recent Poets (both from Wipf & Stock). His latest book, The Work of Creation: Selected Prose, was released by Wipf & Stock this January. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in numerous publications, including 32 Poems, American Literary Review, The Collagist, Contemporary Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry East, Verse Daily, and The Writer's Chronicle, as well as on the American Public Media national radio program "On Being." Hankins serves as Senior Editor at Asheville Poetry Review and as a staff reviewer for Southern Humanities Review. He is the founder and editor of Orison Books, a non-profit literary press focused on the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives.

Dante Di Stefano's first collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere. He has won the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts, The Red Hen Press Poetry Award, The Crab Orchard Review's Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry, and The Ruth Stone Poetry Prize. He earned his PhD in Poetry from Binghamton University and he makes his living as a high school English teacher in Endicott, New York.​

 

Vaginal perplexity 1: trolling for a scientific method along the Coulée verte [by Tracy Danison]

From what I could gather from her pretty seamless but warm manner, Karine was pretty enthusiastic about my Theory of Vaginal Perplexity.

In any case, she kept me talking about it for nearly an hour when I broached the subject over dinner one evening not long ago. She never interrupted but to laugh and order a couple glasses of wine.

In sum, my theory got quite a gay reception – ‘though she doesn’t usually drink so much and she kept fidgeting, crossing and re-crossing her legs, which I thought, think, distracting, especially since she was wearing such a short skirt. Golly!

Also, at that point in the subject-broaching maneuver - for strategic reasons evident to anybody who always vainly attempts to manipulate rather than just ask - I hadn’t yet mentioned the Penis Envy Polling Project, my scientifically-oriented opinion poll idea.

After dinner, Karine and I went home, the both of us, not too-drinked-up, not too-stuffed with food, hand-in-hand, lightly swing-swaying to Hozier’s From Eden, playing in one ear each. Smiling to beat the bands.

So, after a perfectly successful subject-broaching, this morning I want to expect an enthusiastic reception for a Musée d’Orsay sortie assorted with the cheerful execution of my Penis Envy Polling Project.

I plunge down the steps of the Bel Air métro and into the boulevard de Picpus – Ugh! What an ugly name! Picpus! But there you are… I dash on...

I think suddenly that she might feel less enthusiasm, Karine, perhaps, for her utterly key role in the Penis Envy Polling Project than for the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity itself. She sometimes isn't easy to deal with before lunch.

But then what is it that Orwell quoted Talleyrand as saying about Napoléon? "L'audace! Toujours de l'audace!" Good advice when you're obliged to run up the boulevard de... Ugh... Picpus.

As I say, she had laughed, quite girlishly, I think, not just once, but several times when I was telling her about it. She had actually laughed at me more than once before she said, “Well, mon Tracy, I am pretty vaginally perplexed myself.” 

She was saying that, she said, in case I hadn’t noticed - meaning the vaginal perplexity. She drained her wine glass and called for another. She had said that quite dryly, when I came to think of it… I thought it all a very good sign, actually.

Perhaps, I am now thinking, she won’t identify with the crucial scientific step involved in the Penis Envy Polling Project…And this Project, I know, must be carried forward if the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity is to have any scientific legs at all.

But, then, I reflect, as the designated meeting-café hoves into view, Karine can be a real sport if you take her from the right side before breakfast. And so have I, more than once. So. Confidence.

Ever since I got my degree in the ephemeral arts and handless metaphysics, I’ve reckoned that, if I act at all, I can only act upon that which is firmly rooted in the scientific method. So it is and so it shall be for the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity.

Therefore, the Penis Envy Polling Project is designed to knock down one absurd theory in order to give more apparent credibility to my own.

Descartes and Newton operated in just this way, I am told. Also that guy they call the Father of The Bomb, and others.

Karine & my plan is to meet in the doubtful sunshine in this flat-iron shaped café, bordered on one side by boulevard de Picpus (!) and the narrow, sunless rue Sibuet.  I am a bit late and in a bit of a hurry, too. 

The idea is to stay in the café just the time to gulp a coffee and have a pre-walk pee-pee. From the Square Courteline – nice name: Put on your crinoline at Courteline, partner! – which is at the very end of rue Sibuet, you can climb right up onto the Coulée verte  –  whose name I find as ineffably lovely as I find Picpus plug-ugly.

The Coulée verte is a disaffected train-viaduct-turned-urban-garden that links the sublimely ridiculous to the depressingly quotidian, starting at the Opéra and ending at a filthy aluminum stairway that spirals helter-skelter onto the weary shoulders of the Périphérique ring road at the Porte de Montempoivre. But who ever goes there?

Coulée means not just a “flow” but implies “casting”, the heavy white-hot push-along of liquid iron, or quick-hardening lava.

So, the Coulée verte is a running slash of hardening earth tones, specked – in some dawns sparkling – with flaming reds, radiant yellows, and jarring whites, as it cuts across the brick & limestone, concrete & aluminum of the east’s dense urban space.

They call the Coulée verte a “jardin linéaire”.

If ever I have a garden of my own, it shall be a jardin linéaire, a lightning bolt of vegetal flow driving like tunneling love through the symmetries that make up a good life for ME.

I swear I shall accept no other. And neither should you.

I kissed Karine for the first time up on the Coulée verte.

I was so scared she’d indignantly push me away that I still tremble deliciously when I pass the spot where we did the deed that led here and now.

Our idea for today is to walk down the Coulée verte to near the Gare de Lyon and then to walk across the pont d’Austerlitz and take the RER C to the Musée d’Orsay, where, if Karine agrees and she must, the Penis Envy Polling Project will be carried out.

Karine is already sitting on the café terrace, on the Sibuet side, when I arrive. She waves cheerfully; she’s already drinking a tea.

Since Karine mostly has a life, she doesn’t necessarily know – faute du temps – the ins and outs of things I might take for granted. So, without further ado, as preamble to the Project, I sit down and blurt out the whole Penis Envy/Envie de pénis/Penisneid theory.

Before I have well finished, she laughs out loud.

I am puzzled and a little miffed. So I say so.

She takes rather an uppity tone, touches my cheek with the tips of her nice, cool fingers, saying of course she wants a penis; why would she bother herself like this, if not?

Then she bursts out, “Envie du pénis!” She laughs really, really hard.

People are looking around to stare at the big-haired crazy woman and her fawning bald man. I understand them. I am near to whispering calumny to the neighbor at my elbow, too.

“I haven’t heard talk of penis envy in years,” she says, trying, unsuccessfully, to muffle a spontaneous girlie squeal.

The problem, I realize, is translation.

In everyday French, “envie” means simply “want” or “desire” and has done since the middle of the 19^th century. At least.

Unless you’re one of the Psychologismo crowd or of those who think the first definition in the Robert dictionary is the current definition and the circumflex accent is important, envie in French doesn’t imply English “envy” - jealous desire or a lack of what somebody else has, as it does in English.

So I puff up a little, say, as an aroused cobra might stretch its hood just prior to striking dead an especially insolent mongoose.

I tell Karine that “penis envy” means “entertain a jealousy of the penis or of those who possess it.”

Feel jealous of the penis, Karine, I continue, just as I might feel jealous of your woman’s pleasure, Karine, which I cannot experience.

This seems to sober her a little. "Hhhmmm. Woman's pleasure."

She puts her cup carefully in the saucer, says, “How jealous are you of my pussy, exactly?”

She pauses.

I pause.

Stretching my cobra hood a bit tighter and sitting up a little straighter, I reply dignantly. 

“I am asking you, Karine, if you vainly want a penis, if you envy me my penis. Are you jealous of men in general because they have penises and you guys don’t? Do girls feel fundamentally castrated?”

I spread my hands. “How shall I be more clear?”

“You don’t answer,” Karine says. I am thinking, she says that a bit too evenly... I am suddenly afraid she'll leave me. Is there somebody else?

I swivel around to see who might be able to overhear.

I feel my whole body blush as I lean into the table and whisper hoarsely, “You know very well how much, Bébé.”

I try to wink, but can’t.

I say instead, “It’s not the subject.” Hors sujet !

“Well,” she says, smiling, “If it’s not the subject, it’s not the subject.”

“So, mon Tracy, what’s your project?”

To be continued...

The Solitary Life (by Lawrence J. Epstein)

When I was young, I went to Woodstock one day to visit the artist Clarence Schmidt. Clarence lived alone in a treehouse. The property he owned had rusted automobiles, wooden stakes with dolls’ heads stuck on them, and aluminum foil wrapped around much of the place.

I knocked at the small door of the treehouse. Clarence opened up. There were a lot of Table Talk pie wrappers. He was lying flat. He showed us a magazine spread of his paintings. He was proud of them and the fact that they were recognized. We talked for a while, and then I asked him why he had wrapped so much aluminum around his belongings. He looked at me slyly and said, “To keep out the death rays.” I think he meant that the aluminum was a border to stop the insane content of the outside society from killing him. Among those I was with was a young woman who had remarkably smooth skin. Clarence, whose skin was rough and tattered, asked her if he could rub her cheek. She let him. After a while, he said he needed to be alone again.

I was very taken with Clarence. I thought he was alone but not lonely. For an artist, the solitary life away from the bustling intrusions of society allowed for uninterrupted and private thought. Wordsworth called it “that inward eye/Which is the bliss of solitude.” Artists in this role are metaphors for humans deeply in need of silence not for its own sake but as a prompt for constructing a castle of private thought.

I once heard Andy Warhol interviewed as he walked out of a play. The interviewer asked him what he thought of the play. Warhol responded, “I thought it was boring. But I like being bored.” It struck me that his life was so busy that an unengaging play gave him an unusual moment to be with himself. Boredom became a rare but valued friend.

A lot of people mistakenly believe Thoreau was a hermit at Walden Pond and deliberately went there to live separately. Thoreau’s friends had helped him. The cabin was built on Emerson’s land. Bronson Alcott, an educational reformer and Louisa May Alcott’s father, loaned Thoreau the axe to fell trees for the cabin’s construction. And these and many other friends came to visit him. He liked having them there. He also liked walking home to have lunch with his mother. Thoreau’s isolation was undertaken to have an opportunity to study nature, what he considered to be the source of eternal truths. Solitude, when he had it, let him focus on the natural world.

Emily Dickinson’s solitude came from what was probably a nervous disorder, an inability to leave their home. During her last years she left it only once to go next door to her brother’s house because her much-adored nephew was dying. She had to rush back quickly. This solitude, imposed by her psychological make-up, certainly gave her time to write, but no emotional satisfaction. She was unable to publish more than a few of her poems in her life and those were mostly published in a local paper. Her solitude was a sad one. Many are fascinated by her posthumous fame, but in her case the solitude was only accidentally helpful. Mostly, it was devastating.

All these people provide lessons for us about how to live, and how not to live if we can help it. For those making “a separate peace” with the society, the solitary life offers valuable opportunities. For those so used to a world that is “too much with us,” however, it is more difficult to slow down.

From a social point of view, many baby boomers have retired or will soon retire. They will encounter a sort of aloneness they have never experienced. They will need models of a productive solitary life.